Jun 08, 2018
SACRAMENTO, CA -- Shared Abundance, a mural highlighting the California rice story, recently was completed in downtown Sacramento, at the busy corner of 8th and K Streets, near the Golden 1 Center, home to the Sacramento Kings professional basketball team. The vibrant giant-sized painting links together the many facets of rice farming and the abundant wildlife attracted to the habitat created by shallow-flooded rice fields in the Sacramento Valley.
The mural, part of the annual California Rice art program, was painted by Franceska Gámez, a young artist raised in the San Francisco Bay Area who received her degree in Fine Arts at California State University, Sacramento in 2014. Gámez has completed murals in Bali, Barcelona, Washington, DC, and San Francisco. Her work is heavily influenced by intuition, dreams, memories, transcendence, resilience, nature, and definitions of home. She works with many different mediums, the urban landscape and public works being her most favored.
“The main star of my mural is the Great Blue Heron,” said Gámez. “Knowing that California rice fields are the home to over 200 wildlife species, mainly birds, I really wanted to showcase that fact along with all the other great things their industry does for our community.”
Go here to see a video clip of the making of this artwork. The page also provides background on the California Rice Commission (CRC) art program, an important part of public education outreach that includes wooden boxes adorned with the commissioned artwork and filled with locally grown rice products and industry information that CRC delivers each year to state legislators and other key influencers.